Not that I eat healthy… Because I’m practically underweight so I’ll generally eat anything. But after eating organic for awhile in the past I definitely favor fresh healthy over junk food. Regular Americanized food just tastes fake to me.
Same with my room/home… It’s so much easier when you only have less to take care of.
Degrowth is such a fucking stupid idea. What we need is socialism. The demonic oligarchs that run the world are never going to prioritize reducing climate change. They’ve made that clear over the last century. There’s too much profit to be made.
Worker owned means of production is the only solution. Only then can we direct the productive forces toward solving the most immediate problems that humanity faces. We’ve created so much productivity, but we need to guide it in the direction of sustainability instead of the profit motive.
You’re conflating two very different things. You can have an equitable system of worker owned coops that still has a growth mindset and destroys the ecosystem. You don’t magically become sustainable when socialism becomes a thing. Growth itself when we’re bound by the resources of a single planet a problem, period.
I agree. Once we have socialism, we can have degrowth. But none of these articles that come out about it are advocating for that. They’re advocating that the working class take the hit for climate change via increased unemployment, poverty, and ultimately death.
Degrowth could definitely only be accomplished under a socialist model where we aren’t price gouged for food and housing. A life with less work and less disposable crap sounds really fucking good though.
In order to slow the economy down and not wreak havoc, he said, we have to reconfigure our ideas about the entire economic system.
This is how degrowthers envision the process: After a reduction in material and energy consumption, which will constrict the economy, there should also be a redistribution of existing wealth, and a transition from a materialistic society to one in which the values are based on simpler lifestyles and unpaid work and activities.
Sounds good to me. It is a fair point that the basic operation of our society depends on continual growth, but redistribution seems like it would be an effective way of mitigating those problems degrowth might cause. We have more than enough resources to keep everyone alive, we just have to use them.
Yeah, good luck with that. Won’t happen. Do you really believe that the 1% will give up it’s riches? Do you really believe that the politicians, you know, the guys with money, will decide on redistribution?
There is overlap, but ultimately it’s not a monolith. Anyone can be a politician and politicians succeed or fail on people voting for them. What are the rich gonna do with ownership of all the land and all the companies and all the resources anyway? Effectively enslave everybody? Wait for us to starve so they can keep playing number-go-up in secure enclaves while the world burns around them?
You mention universal income in another comment. If you do it right, that’s redistribution. You give people the means to keep living, every other problem gets less intense. I think there’s a good chance that when things get bad enough, even hardcore capitalists will go for it because it’s a way for capitalism to continue existing in a form that isn’t a dead useless husk. IMO a much better option than pulling for a civil war hoping the result will be a socialist utopia and not just evil warlords doing evil warlord stuff.
I’d rather just do the full communism now path, where once every man, woman and child has all their needs and many of their wants met, there isn’t a desire to chase the next fashion craze, or buy the next iphone or “keep up with the jones’” as it were because the Jones’ have the same stuff you do, but maybe they spend their ample leisure time exercising, you spend your time gardening.
The only way that will work is if you have a violent dictatorship. Welcome Stalin back basically.
I see more future in putting laws in place that severely limits what companies can do. Companies cannot grow beyond 1000 people. Tax any wealth thing heavily. Tax negatively for the poor, tax a little for those with a little and more for those that are better off. Taxes go up and up once you are richer and Once your income and or networth reaches a certain level, tax 100%.
Institute 3-4 work day weeks
Institute universal income
Out extreme limits on advertising and marketing. Those two are the real evils of mankind.
Require news outlets be paid for by the government and be required to be neutral and factual
With changes like that we can remain a (serverely limited) capitalist system that pays for the very nice social system below that doesn’t focus in money anymore
Laws will be written with loopholes. Just nationalize industry run them for the public rather the for profit and fire the CEOs/Lobbyists and PMC’s that keep Capitalism operating.
Also I’ll take a Stalin for the initial break from Capitalism. After 10ish years, we can go to a more democratic government.
From the narrowly focused aspect of clothing, what can we do? Repair. Repair your clothes. Don’t throw away a ripped shirt, don’t replace it with a flimsy new shirt made by underpaid workers. Sew it. Patch it. Check your library for books about mending, go to YouTube and seek out basic repair videos. A packet of needles, a thimble, a spool of black thread, and a spool of white thread will take care of the majority of repairs. What you can’t do yourself can be handled by your neighborhood laundry or dry cleaner.
Practice radical repairing. Mend your way to a better world.
There are a lot of BS jobs that don’t create any value (real estate agents, advertising, …) and a lot of work that is not getting done because nobody would pay for it, for example cleaning up the environment, worker shortage in hospitals and elder care.
Look around you. Are there things to be done? Parks to be cleaned? Old houses to be renovated? Run down areas of town? Are there any hungry children in nearby schools? If you answered yes to any of those, then there is work to be done.
Why, if there is work to be done, is it not getting done? What type of society undervalues such critical work such that you would look at the state of the work and think that there is not enough work for everyone to contribute.
There are plenty of jobs, there is infinite work, but the current value system doesn’t incentivise this work that would improve everyone’s life.
So two questions.
Why doesn’t the current system value this work?
What would the world look like of that type of work was valued?
That in mind, given that you assume mass unemployment, which is questionable at best, reconsider why that would be. Who, or what, would be the cause?
This will go the same way the “Green New Deal” did. It will scare the ruling class, the ruling class will send its media minions to demonize it, and nothing will change. doomer
If the phone were 5% lighter that would be an actual improvement. Instead phones get heavier and thinner and bigger. So overall the experience diminishes as they try to be tablets.
No disagreement there. But a problem with modern consumer electronics is that they AREN’T ACTUALLY BETTER then last year’s model. Sure you can talk about pixel density etc, but that was actually a solved problem almost 10 years ago. Apple called it a “retna” display. They idea is that at a certain pixel density and screen size, there is no benefit to adding more . But capitalism always requires more, so since you can’t add pixels, you have to add screen space. But the iphone was already designed to be used one handed. People’s hands haven’t grown in the past 10 years, so why are they making the phones bigger which makes it a worse user experience?
Anyway, I dont’ want to derail into phone chat. but I’ll say that if they did actually start making lighter phones with the same battery life, I wouldn’t consider that an actual improvement to that space, but that isn’t what is happening :/
Like how about we work less and we immediately and totally nationalize energy and agriculture haha just a thought haha (fireflies are going extinct haha)
That’s cool. Do they ignore climate change in their energy calculations? Because if they are nationalized and choose to burn Shale Oil for energy, then they are kind of missing the point.
We can do one thing. Communist dumbasses can already move to communist countries to learn how dumb their ideas are, while enjoying some consequences. Meanwhile we can try to fix political corruption and cronyism by voting to those who give two shits about the health of the country, since we’ll have less dumbasses who keep thinking that giving more and more power to unaccountable corrupt politicians is the solution.
can already move to communist countries to learn how dumb their ideas are
While you’re sitting happy and ignorant in a capitalist country and have not learned how dumb its ideas are.
we can try to fix political corruption and cronyism
Yeah as I just said you didn’t learn how dumb your ideas are. “Crony” capitalism is just capitalism. Full stop. Attempts to regulate it meaningfully are seen as against capitalism by ignorant bootlickers like yourself and so that’s already a non starter.
by voting to those who give two shits about the health of the country
That’s failed so far, for decades now, especially because most choices are the choice between two people already bought and sold by billionaires. Which brings me to the last part of this.
giving more and more power to unaccountable corrupt politicians is the solution
Your solution is giving more and more power to even less accountable tech billionaires, and that’s fucking clownish.
The article is, in my opinion, purposely mischaracterizing the degrowth movement. I would say degrowth is more a natural reaction to the excesses of capitalism than movement about addressing climate change.
Isn’t the former very naturally part of the latter though ? And doesn’t the article also raise that point as well? Fundamentally it’s an idea that often gets interpreted through both those lenses because it could help with both conflicts, which is also what by definition is it’s purposely trying to accomplish, the first explicitly and the second is implicit in
… within planetary boundaries.
This connection I think should be embraced because climate change is more attractive as a topic to most people than critiques of capitalism but obviously one leads naturally into the other. Saying that degrowth aims to address climate change is more just a description of partial content rather than a mischaracterization and the body of the article tries reasonably to explain other parts as well, less work and better well being are right there in the title, both not a dishonest description of other parts of the philosophy.
After all no one that accepts degrowth as a concept would answer the question “Should we degrow to combat climate change ?” with a “No” All answers would be “yes and …” or “yes but …”
At the end of the day Vice writing will never be perfect but nowadays for genpop media outlets it tries much harder than most to paint an honest picture of the world, and calling this article a mischaracterization seems to me a little harsh, if you’ve never heard of it the article certainly could honestly teach and spark interest for a this “new” way of thinking, and you need just one word to google to get more rigorous explanation if you wanted it.
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